Much like the open source movement before it, the open hardware movement will have a slow crawl to a bare victory.
It'll first be used a lot by labs, embedded applications and general infrastructure, far away from the consumer space with only a little bit of overlap.
Then, hopefully, some new Apple-like company manages to slam dunk their presentation and introduction to market, effectively disrupting the market - in a good way.
Follow me for more hopeful divining. We'll have the shaking of sticks, a dead goat boy and symbols written in the floor.
Whats also awesome is, that SiFives devices run Coreboot out of the box.
I own a Thinkpad T430 and soon a Clevo NV41 and both are also Coreboot compatible. Most excited about the new hardware, even though it will need a fully blobbed Coreboot... SiFive on the other hand is probably fully FOSS?? This is crazy!
Sad news about SiFive lately :/ all but the founding members got cut. We'll see where that goes...
But yes, RISC-V getting better and more performant is a net gain. I'm thinking that open firmware will be the future battleground of liberation movements.
"Listen, you can't have open firmware, because manufacturers want to give you secret sauce security, and also authorities need to catch terrorists and pedophiles... see, they are evil and-" sush.. let me have my long lasting, open firmware system. I want it, I want it NAO!!